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Shakespeare Quarterly 53.3 (2002) 386-388



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The New Cambridge Shakespeare As You Like It. Edited by Michael Hattaway. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Illus. Pp. xiv + 219. $50.00 cloth, $13.00 paper.

Michael Hattaway finds As You Like It "dangerous in its exposure of gender instability . . . [but] still . . . fun, full of exuberance and wit" (vii). His enthusiastic introduction to this New Cambridge edition ranges widely but is firmly based in the theater, using the representation of Arden on the stage, for instance, as a way into concluding that "whenever we encounter the word [Arden] we must remember that this is an imaginary location, as 'French' as it is 'English', as fantastic as it is familiar" (8). This kind of indeterminacy becomes the underlying theme of the introduction and, by extension, of Hattaway's interpretation of a play in which he discovers "a set of paradoxes and contradictions that can be turned into a multitude of coexistent interpretations" (4). He encourages us to look further into the provisional quality of the play's conclusion, with all its ifs, and, without clearly explaining why it is "dangerous," offers several readings of Rosalind's doubleness of gender, drawing on productions in which Orlando recognizes the woman beneath Ganymede's clothes as well as those, more usual, in which he doesn't. Hattaway himself occasionally becomes infected by indeterminacy, saying, for instance, that it is "impossible and wrong to fix one tone for the performance of much of the dialogue between the lovers" but deciding (correctly) that "no production is going to succeed unless Arden is a place for fun" (40 and 41).

Writing in an easy, jargon-free style, he pithily discusses both pastoral and anti-pastoral, how the play comments on ideas of liberty and the decline of hospitality in the late-sixteenth century and much else besides. His breadth of scholarship, scarcely contained by the text, results in so many references that footnotes climb the pages, reaching beyond halfway on page 31. Off-putting to the student, perhaps, but they provide a rich bibliography.

Stage history, often excitedly informed by eyewitness accounts, takes up nearly a third of the introduction, with detailed attention given to the variety found in post-1950 productions. I would, however, gladly have sacrificed one or two of the eleven full-page illustrations for a consideration of performances in the southern hemisphere, of which there is not a single mention.

Hattaway's concise glosses and generous notes will satisfy both the student who needs to know that "the humorous Duke" (2.3.8) is not a funny man but a capricious one and the scholar wanting to know more about bloody napkins as stage properties [End Page 386] (4.3.149); and his command of an impressively broad sweep of material gives many fresh insights, especially through contemporary texts. Paying particular attention to the play's abundant bawdy, he sometimes overflows the measure: in certain contexts, certainly, shadow can mean "catamite" and come can mean "orgasm", but surely not when Rosalind, on being left by Orlando, says "I'll go find a shadow and sigh till he come" (4.1.173-74). However, the note suggesting that "taller" at 1.2.224 could mean "more spirited or handsome" cautiously makes a brilliant suggestion about a word that has troubled editors since Rowe. Hattaway argues a good case for keeping F's reading instead of Rowe's much-accepted 1714 emendation "shorter." (We can compare Sir Toby's ironic comment that Sir Andrew Aguecheek is "as tall a man as any's in Illyria" [Twelfth Night,1.3.16].) The garbled note for 1.3.48, claiming that at 1.2.182 "the Duke reveals his hatred of Roland for being the enemy of his son," indicates haste in proofreading.

The only primary text for the play is the First Folio's, and Hattaway is in general agreement with most previous opinion that it "derives from a play-book" (203). (But he can't resist the temptation to surmise that a play-book may have been given to the Stationers...

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